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Showing Off Eclectic Tastes

The tattoos on Marcelo D2, the Brazilian rapper, honor not only his children but his musical heroes, including Jimi Hendrix.Credit
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

THE tattoos on the body of the Brazilian rapper Marcelo D2 are more than decorations; they are also a statement of musical purpose and direction. One arm shows the image of the samba singer José Bezerra da Silva above the logo of the hardcore punk band Black Flag, while the face of Jimi Hendrix peeks out from the other. And on his neck is printed the title of John Coltrane’s most influential recording, “A Love Supreme.”

All the styles those homages are meant to represent — and more — are likely to be present when Marcelo D2, born in Rio de Janeiro in 1967 as Marcelo Maldonado Peixoto, performs Sunday at Central Park SummerStage. Even more than most hip-hop artists he has always had wide-ranging tastes and a curiosity to see what happens when different genres are combined in unexpected ways.

“I adore feijoada,” the stew of black beans and pork trimmings that is Brazil’s national dish, “but I love hamburger too,” he explained during an interview in the Greenwich Village town house where he is spending the month. “I love the Ramones, the Dead Kennedys and Bad Brains, but I also love samba, bossa nova and Jorge Ben. That’s why I’ve gone for this mixture.”

Sunday’s Central Park show, which will also include sets by the Brazilian rock singer Pitty and by DJ Nuts, is the opening event of the weeklong Brasil Summerfest, a new entry in the city’s summer music festivals. The biggest names in Brazilian pop music are now familiar presences in New York — Tom Zé visited this week and Milton Nascimento just last month — but the Brasil Summerfest is staking out new ground by focusing on some underappreciated genres and less familiar names.

Jorge Continentino, for example, has a steady job playing saxophone and flute in the group Forró in the Dark, whose transformation of what was originally an accordion-driven rural style has made it a New York club favorite. But at Nublu on Wednesday he will performing a show called “Pifanology,” dedicated to the small fife-like instrument called the pífano, which is widely used in a kind of a hillbilly music from northeastern Brazil and is of indigenous origin.

Because the pífano, originally made of bamboo, is so small and seems like a toy, players often struggle to have the instrument taken seriously. To counteract that image and show what the pífano can do in the right hands, Mr. Continentino’s set list includes John Coltrane’s “26-2,” a notoriously difficult piece built around a pattern of chords descending in major thirds.

Photo

Mikael Mutti of Percussivo Mundo Novo makes music with a guitar-shaped instrument embedded with an iPad.Credit
Valecia Ribeiro

Rashied Ali, one of Coltrane’s former drummers, “once saw me improvising on the pífano,” Mr. Continentino recalled, “and said to me, ‘That’s amazing, I didn’t know you could do that, and it’s not even an instrument.’ I had to reply, ‘Rashied, with all due respect, I have to say it is an instrument, and not an easy one.’ ”

The festival’s final show, on July 30 at S.O.B.’s, has similar objectives. Percussivo Mundo Novo, an ensemble based in the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia that will be performing in New York for the first time, aims to show that even a joystick, a Wii remote and an iPad, which Mikael Mutti, the founder of the five-piece group, inserts into the body of a mock guitar, can be made into musical instruments.

“Our project is to open new possibilities by using what is most modern in technology, like video-game controls and computers, and mixing it with the language of percussion that is associated with our Afro-Bahian roots,” said Mr. Mutti, who has played with Carlinhos Brown, the German heavy metal band Scorpions and Carlos Santana, speaking by telephone from Salvador, Brazil. “We want to show that the electronics can be used without losing the essence of timeless rhythms, that something which looks like a silly game can be transformed into a real instrument with an interesting sonority.”

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For his part Marcelo D2 is also continuing to experiment. While in New York this month he’s been spending time with American musicians at Electric Lady Studios — built by his idol Jimi Hendrix — working on a follow-up to his last CD, a tribute to his samba hero Bezerra da Silva that marked a step away from hip-hop and back to his roots.

“When I was a teenager and first was paying close attention to Bezerra da Silva, I was also listening a lot to Public Enemy, which was all ‘fight the power,’ very militant,” he explained. “I love Public Enemy. But I prefer Bezerra da Silva’s sly way of portraying things because it’s more amusing. That’s the Brazilian way: Don’t get mad, just make fun of your problems.”

Marcelo D2, whose stage name is based on a street slang term for sharing a joint, began as a rocker and in the 1990s was a member of the group Planet Hemp, then one of the most popular in Brazil. But after the group’s co-founder, his closest friend, died and he and the remaining band members were jailed for “eulogizing the consumption of drugs” in the lyrics of their songs, the band’s fortunes waned, and his own musical interests began drifting.

In contrast to those of other Brazilian rappers Marcelo D2’s songs primarily use samples drawn from samba and bossa nova rather than American rhythm and blues or funk. He can still recall his excitement when he arrived in Los Angeles to make Planet Hemp’s second record and got his hands on his first Akai MPC portable digital sampler, which, he said, still occupies a position of honor on the mantel of his living room.

“I grabbed it, went to the studio and immediately started putting as much Brazilian stuff into it as I could,” he said. “The first thing I sampled was a samba-school recording, which I filtered and looped, and when I put a boom box beat on top of that, I knew that from that moment on that was where my music was going to come from.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 22, 2011, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Showing Off Eclectic Tastes. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe